Christopher Lasch

Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.

Today Americans are overcome not by the sense of endless possibility but by the banality of the social order they have erected against it.

A growing awareness of the depth of popular attachment to the family has led some liberals to concede that family is not just a buzzword for reaction.

The left dismisses talk about the collapse of family life and talks instead about the emergence of the growing new diversity of family types.

The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.

The left sees nothing but bigotry and superstition in the popular defense of the family or in popular attitudes regarding abortion, crime, busing, and the school curriculum.

Most people no longer live in nuclear families at all.

It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family.

A child's appetite for new toys appeal to the desire for ownership and appropriation: the appeal of toys comes to lie not in their use but in their status as possessions.

Adherents of the new religious right reject the separation of politics and religion, but they bring no spiritual insights to politics.

Liberals subscribe to the new flexible, pluralistic definition of the family; their defense of families carries no conviction.

We are all revolutionaries now, addicts of change.